


Verde

by o2doko



Category: Speed Racer (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-13
Updated: 2011-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-15 15:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/162188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/o2doko/pseuds/o2doko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Breakfast at the Racer household.  Some things change; but most things never will.  And strength comes in many different forms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Verde

They’ve been sitting in the driveway a full two minutes now, but X has made no move to lift his hands from the steering wheel.  He’s not wearing his leather driving gloves for once, so the inspector can tell exactly how hard he’s gripping it from the white of his bloodless knuckles, from the way old scars twitch and jump across the back of his hands.  “Easy there,” he murmurs, low and soft as he focuses on the kitschy orange keychain his daughter bought him last year for Christmas, swinging innocuously from the ignition.  “My baby’s not as tough as yours.”

X does relinquish the wheel then, slowly and with a touch of sheepish guilt, and the inspector finds this amusing.  The Star may have been too conspicuous to drive about town during the day, but Racer X rode shotgun for no one, and with a show of suffering the inspector had handed over the keys.  It was one of the many concessions made to retain their strange friendship, and the inspector didn’t really mind – even if he did cringe a little every time X gunned the town car beneath an amber traffic light.

“I don’t know why you always drag me along when you come here,” X mutters, and though his sunglasses do a fair job of masking his expression, the inspector can tell that he’s nervous.

“Yes you do,” he argues calmly, adjusting his hat to a less formal angle.  “Now; are we going to move forward anytime today?”

X makes a low sound in his throat that’s almost a growl and then he’s out the door, leaving the inspector to chuckle softly before making his own (less violent) exit.

If there’s anything X likes about the inspector’s car, he muses now, it’s the tinted windows – a last defense for creatures of the night like himself against the blinding colors of the day.  He used to think it comparable to the streaked, loud lights of the track, but he knows differently now.  The neon glow of night is jarring but insubstantial; it evaporates on contact, fades at the first trace of dawn.  But here, beneath the full intensity of the glaring sun, he knows the colors are real – that the brilliant blue of the sky, the very same shade as the Racer’s front door, will draw blood if he lets it.

He waits for the inspector to join him but he doesn’t say anything – he’s too busy carefully placing each foot forward, mindful that he stays on the stone walkway lest the sharp green of the grass bleed onto the cuffs of his charcoal-colored jeans.  Racer X wears black for a reason, and it has nothing to do with fashion or persona.  Black is a defensive color, absorbing the loud, catastrophic symphony of the world and neutralizing it into something safe and quiet again.

But here the colors are stronger, more intense – this place surrounds shadows and devours them whole.

He could never explain this to the detector, and he doesn’t try; that man, who dares to enter this place without so much as a pair of sunglasses, walks between two worlds in a way that X never could.

“Good morning, Inspector Detector … X.” 

Both men are caught off-guard halfway to the front door by the sound of Speed’s voice, coming from the direction of the garage.  They turn to find him barefoot on the lawn, watching them curiously.  It’s not often they have a chance to confront one another by daylight.  Speed is disheveled and only half-dressed, clearly recently risen – but for all that, the lack of four wheels beneath him hasn’t put him out of his element as it has the older racer.  His pajama pants are lime green, like the grass, and fit him poorly; they hang loosely around his hips and pool about the bridges of his bare feet.  His rumpled white t-shirt reflects all the colors of the day back around him, giving his sky blue eyes a brilliant focus despite their curtain of sleep-tousled hair.

He wears daylight well, and somehow this, too, is painful.

There is no need to ask Speed what he had been doing in the garage.  Both men had seen the angry gauge in the Mach’s side as she smoked through the finish line the night before, scattering paint chips like flecks of blood across the checkered tile.  The camera crew had descended on him in a maelstrom of light and sound, but X had watched Speed ignore them all, pulling one leather glove off with his teeth to lay a bare hand on the Mach’s steaming flank – as though his touch alone could heal the hurt that he had caused.  It had taken a mechanic’s positive diagnosis (followed by a creator’s second opinion) to finally coax him away to the winner’s circle, but X has no doubt that the first visit of the morning was reserved for the wounded patient.

“Good morning, Speed,” the  inspector greets pleasantly, never one to miss a beat in basic formalities.  But X cuts him off before he can continue.

“How is she?” he asks quietly, knowing Speed will understand.  He’s rewarded by the younger racer’s warm smile.

“Needs a new coat of paint, obviously, but she’s better than she looks.  Just a scratch.”

The inspector chuckles knowingly to himself and Speed flushes a little, slightly embarrassed.  “Right.  So I guess you guys want to come in?  Mom’s working on breakfast and she always makes extra.”

(X is momentarily incapacitated.  Luckily, the inspector knows him well and covers.)  “Thanks, Speed, but we wouldn’t want to impose – perhaps we can stop by at a later time.”

Speed shoots a contemplative look between them – he’s not stupid and he’s never slow, even barefoot and in ill-fitting pajamas – and finally he just shrugs.  “It’s really not a problem.  She’d be offended now if you didn’t stay.  C’mon.”  And apparently he’s not giving them an option, because he’s already padding across the lawn towards the garage and they’re clearly meant to follow.

X throws an uncertain glance towards the front door.  Following Speed means wading through the razor sharp green, means entering through the garage in a way that a stranger wouldn’t – means sitting down and eating the food Mrs. Racer subconsciously prepared for her dead son.  Swallowing hard, X brushes a thumb across the hip of his jeans and longs for the protective leather of his racing gear, begins to think he didn’t dress appropriately.  Then he realizes the inspector has already started after Speed, that both of them aren’t giving him a choice.  X gets the message – he made this grave, and now he must lie in it.

Speed calls out, “Mom, we’ve got company!” when he leads them across the threshold, but it’s unnecessary because Mrs. Racer is already watching them, has been from the moment they started across the yard in front of the kitchen window.  She never ceases mixing pancake batter, but she’s watching the way the two drivers move side-by-side, the way the inspector hangs back a little out of a deference she’s beginning to understand.  She smiles a greeting, calls out a friendly ‘good morning’, but her eyes are like daggers – not hostile, exactly, but sharp, alert and watchful.  X thinks ‘Speed gets his eyes from her.’  He thinks, ‘She, too, was waiting to see if her green grass made me bleed.’

Inspector Detector begins to talk then – a relief, because now her eyes are focused on him.  X can hear the rainbow babble of Saturday morning cartoons splashing down the living room walls, filling all the vases that Mrs. Racer left empty.  He takes this as evidence that Spritle hasn’t noticed the disruption to his routine yet.  Trixie is already seated at the table beside Sparky, glancing between Speed and X with an amused smile that’s slightly disconcerting – though not in the way Mrs. Racer’s is, so it’s okay with him.

Mrs. Racer and the inspector have finished with the formality of apology-reassurance, and now the two guests are ushered into their own seats.  X finds himself between Speed and Trixie, close enough to hazard an embarrassed stab at the source of her amusement, close enough to see the bruises and scrapes on Speed’s arm from yesterday’s race.  Pops enters the room, his bright red shirt an audible exclamation point in direct but friendly opposition with the cheerful paint on the walls.  He’s surprised at his guests and curious about their presence, but this family has always had firm ideas about conducting business at meal times – ideas that, since Royalton, had become concrete – and so Pops doesn’t even ask.  He merely takes his seat as his wife places a large stack of pancakes at the center of the table, calling for their youngest to join them.  The circus is complete a moment later when Spritle and Chim-Chim appear at the doorway, wearing a set of matching yellow pajamas.  As usual, Spritle keeps his distance from X; but he seems to have no problem with the inspector, who almost instantly becomes a sounding board for his latest television show idea.

For the record, it starts innocently enough.

“So, Speed,” the inspector says when he finally manages to extricate himself from the maze of Spritle’s chatter.  “Congratulations on the win last night.”

Speed smiles around a mouthful of pancake and sets his fork down.  “Close one,” he muses, with his characteristic home-grown humbleness.  “Almost hung the Mach out to dry, too.”

“There was never any doubt that he’d win,” Spritle chimes in with a knowing air, practically climbing into the inspector’s lap in order to spear a pancake off of Sparky’s plate, the mechanic momentarily lost to the morning paper.  “It was always a sure thing.”  He speaks in a lofty tone that he considers very grown-up and which he’s borrowed from a talk show host.

“Always a sure thing?” X scoffs before he can catch himself, watching Mrs. Racer catch the stolen pancake mid-air with practiced ease and return it to its rightful plate.  “Speed said himself he almost botched the end.”

And Speed _had_ said himself; but something in X’s tone makes him bristle anyway, nostrils flaring with the scent of a challenge.  (Trixie, who already knows what’s coming, begins to laugh quietly into her glass of milk.  Sparky, under the guise of circling a car parts add, makes a score chart on the margin of the paper and covertly shows it to her.)

“Right, I did.  For the record, though, I never would’ve risked squeezing through that gap if I thought the Mach couldn’t take it.  But she’s built tougher than that.”

Pops waves a forkful of pancake in approving agreement, but X just snorts.  “Oh, c’mon, Speed – you’re just arguing semantics.  The point is that you weren’t paying attention – that gap should never have existed.  You were treating that whole race as a joy ride, and you had no idea what the other drivers were doing the entire time.”

Sparky puts a tick mark in X’s column.  Speed takes an aggressive swipe at his breakfast with the wrong end of his knife.

“Now wait a minute, that’s not true,” he protests irritably.  “I knew exactly where they were.  I just wasn’t expecting Sands to come up so fast.  Everyone knows he totaled his baby last week and that toy he’s driving now isn’t fit for scrap.  I still have no idea how he pushed that engine so hard without the entire car shaking itself apart.”

They are all a little surprised at the contempt in his voice.

“Oh, so wait; you’re telling me all there is to a driver is his car?”  X pushes ruthlessly.  The other members have begun to follow the argument intently, back and forth like a ping pong match (all except Chim-Chim, of course, who has taken advantage of the distraction to pilfer the bowel of blue berries and is cheerfully creating a god-loving mess all over the inspector’s shoes.)

“The best driver in the world can’t win on a tricycle,” Speed throws back hotly.  “A good car isn’t enough, sure, but it’s still part of it.”

“So you’re saying you couldn’t have won that race in Sand’s car if Sands were driving the Mach.”

“Sands couldn’t handle the Mach.”  He says it hard, scornful, his eyes glittering with a possessive intensity that dangerously skirts the threshold of obsession.  Nothing makes X’s heart hammer faster than that look, maybe not even racing, and he’s sure that up until now he’s the only one who’s seen it.

“Ok, boys, take it easy.  And Speed, honey, give me that knife before you destroy my plate with it.”  Speed does relinquish the cutlery, having the grace to look at her sheepishly while he does it, but X isn’t so easily put in his place anymore.

“That’s beside the point, Speed.  I’m asking you if you could’ve won in Sand’s heap if you were racing against the Mach.”

“No one can get the Mach to run like I can.  And I could’ve beaten that lot no matter what I was driving.”  He spears another forkful of pancake.

“Even the tricycle?” Trixie asks innocently, passing Sparky the syrup without him asking for it so that she has an excuse to check the score.  X is currently in the lead.

Speed laughs, but it’s a challenging sound.  And he doesn’t say ‘no’.

“Okay.  I think I’ve got this straight.  So you almost lost the race and your car last night because you underestimated Sands, not Sands’ car, since you’re telling me that a good driver could’ve won that race even with Sands’ heap.  Which I believe brings us back around to my original point – you got cocky last night and neglected to pay attention to the other drivers!”

Knowing you’ve been caught and  being willing to sit through a lecture about it are two entirely different things.

“Like you’re one to talk.  Last week you ran the Star out against –“

“ _Boys._ ”  This time, her voice catches both of their attentions.

Sparky shows Trixie where he’s totaled the columns and circled the winner – who is, of course, Mrs. Racer.

“You know, I wonder where Sands even found that thing,” Pops muses placidly, as though nothing has happened.  He goes on to discuss models and dates that list way back into time out of mind, but no one is really listening.  (That’s part of the breakfast routine, too.)  Spritle is trying to smuggle Chim-Chim out of the kitchen before the inspector can observe what has happened to his expensive shoes; the inspector is trying to figure out how to clean the mess without anyone noticing that he’s noticed.  Sparky has gone  back to actually reading the paper, and Trixie is munching thoughtfully on a piece of toast while she watches Mrs. Racer watching X and Speed, who continue to glare at one another in furtive, sideways glances.

Mrs. Racer pushes a jar of marmalade, previously untouched, in X’s direction.  Nominally she’s trying to break the tension between the two of them, introduce a distraction, but her eyes are a little too steady for that; and maybe it’s funny how no one’s noticed the additional condiment, which hadn’t made an appearance at breakfast for years.  When X, already distracted himself, takes it and decorates his pancakes with it, not really aware of what he’s doing, she leaves the table a moment to mess around in the fridge.

When she returns she is smiling, cheerful as ever, though she’s empty-handed.  She doesn’t say anything, but in the natural, easy way that mothers have she snatches Sparky’s hat off his head – and then X’s sunglasses from his face.  Both are laid aside on the counter, with the authoritative finality of a woman who knows that here, at least, she gets to make and enforce the rules.

The colors aren’t quite as loud inside the house, but X laments the loss of another protective barrier.  Still, he doesn’t protest.  He just eats his pancakes.

The rest of the meal is passed in relative quiet – for the Racer household, anyway, which means that it still involves two broken dishes, a glass of spilled orange juice, and a fork which mysteriously manages to get itself stuck in a ceiling tile.  When the blue berry mosaic is discovered beneath the table (the ordeal had become an exercise in finger painting, or at least that’s how Spritle attempts to account for it – he argues the virtues of therapeutic shades of blue, another concept he’s borrowed from television, and works at garnering praise for Chim-Chim’s unusual artistic abilities), the two are banished to their room to get cleaned up and keep out of the way.  Pops accepts this natural cue to encourage everyone to join him in the living room, and just like that the mood has changed – it’s back to business again.

But X finds himself dragging his feet, using the pretense of needing to retrieve his sunglasses while he waits for the other three men to shuffle beneath the doorframe.  He stares at the flowers on the wall for a moment, wishing he knew how to fill her empty vases, before pocketing the accessory and moving to help her clean up.

And it’s so strange, he thinks now, watching the rainbow soap suds trickle down the drain, what memory considers adhesive.  He wasn’t expecting to find recollection hiding in the imperfect curve of chipped china ware, but it’s there, nuzzling affectionately into the whorls of his calloused fingerprints.  He can’t help but feel slightly ambushed by it, though he was the one who chose to linger behind.  Now he knows that he’ll always linger behind here – that the invisible fingerprints he left at the edge of her painfully blue door are a sign of permanence, not of retreat, even if they were brushed there in anger to the accompaniment of shouted words and an echoing slam.

He supposes he’s taking Trixe’s place as he dries the water from an orange cup, but she doesn’t seem to mind.  She remains at the table, feigning interest in a magazine, giving them space without alerting the others through a break in routine.  He’s always admired her tact.

“You really don’t have to bother with this if you’d rather join the boys,” Mrs. Racer murmurs, even as she hands him another dripping dish.  (Only then does he realize that he put the cup away without noticing, back in its exact, proper place, and he wonders if it’s too late to pretend unfamiliarity now.  No one comments.)

“The inspector can handle it from here,” he assures her quietly.  “He only drags me along for moral support.”

They’re both thinking, ‘He drags you along because of your influence on Speed,’ but no one comments on that, either.

“He wants Speed for another street race, doesn’t he?”  Mrs. Racer is obviously displeased by the idea, but she is far from petulant.  Her clear eyes are focused, calculating as she gazes out the kitchenette window at her middle child.  “He wrenched his shoulder badly when he was rammed last night.  It’ll affect his driving if it doesn’t heal properly.”

“He has two weeks yet.  And I’ll be driving with him.”

It’s the only promise he can give her now, and she knows it, skims acceptance across his fingertips as she hands him a knife.  He thinks she’ll leave it at that and is relieved at the thought, but he’s always underestimating her.

“I noticed you’re still favoring your left hand from last week’s crash, too.”  Her constant vigilance never fails to unnerve him.

“Sprained wrist,” he shrugs, trying to sound indifferent; and then something about the set of her shoulders makes him add, “I have two weeks yet.  And Speed will be driving with me.”

She smiles, a faint ghost of a smile, but it’s enough.

He puts another cup away and wonders how he ever thought he could fool her. 

Maybe the only ghost in this room is the one she’ll become if she loses another child, though X, who watched from a distance while she bled her strength away over his empty coffin, still can’t think of her as any less than she is.  He silently prays that the bastion of color she’s built around them all is strong enough to suppress the lengthening shadows, that love and determination alone can combat all that’s wrong with the impossibly wide world as it tries to crowd itself into her tiny kitchen. 

Fortresses of steel and stone eventually corrode and crumble, washed away into a past not worth the effort of remembering; but her barriers are intangible, and he hopes that keeps them safe from time’s relentless crawl.

Still, a little reinforcement once in a while can’t hurt.  He recalls the smears of purple bruises on Speed’s arm again, clouded and dark, and thinks maybe a visit to another driver is in order today, too.

(A little finger painting _can_ be therapeutic, though he has no need for blue berries.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm currently accepting commissions; see my [gig page](http://fiverr.com/users/o2doko/gigs/write-an-original-5000-word-story-in-any-genre) for more information.


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